Monthly Archives: February 2016

Freeman argued that the key to the movement’s success was its potential to combine two ways of addressing society’s gender problems: the Egalitarian Ethic and the Liberation Ethic. The first demands an end to sex discrimination and fixed gender roles, but the second seeks a deeper change. ‘To seek only equality, given the current male bias of the social values, is to assume that women want to be like men or that men are worth emulating,’ she wrote. ‘It is to demand that women be allowed to participate in society as we know it… without questioning the extent to which that society is worth participating in.’

Meanwhile, the Liberation Ethic has faded from view. The Furies’ concept of a ‘male world view’, and their notion of dismantling competition and acquisitiveness, would sound, to many modern ears, like antiquated gibberish. And yet the Liberation Ethic might be the best place to start, not only for addressing the special burdens modern women continue to bear, but also for making life better, along a whole lot of dimensions, for both men and women.

And yet, outside the realm of traditional politics, many people – especially young ones – are seeking entirely different ways of seeing relationships, gender, and sex. Growing numbers of people identify as neither male nor female, upending not just gender roles but gender itself. Polyamorous triads and quads and more exotic geometries are reconfiguring romance. BDSM (bondage, dominance, sado-masochism etc) players are dragging unspoken assumptions about sexual dominance and submission out into the light and then reworking them in novel ways. These movements are often framed as simply a matter of individual choice, but they owe their existence to a Liberation Ethic, and they have the potential to cut to the core of centuries-old assumptions about women and men. Kate Bornstein, a prominent gender theorist and transgender activist, argues that challenging assumptions about gender is part of a broader campaign against all sorts of power structures. ‘The value of breaking the gender binary will be to use what we’ve learned to help break down the false binaries masking hierarchical vectors of oppression – namely age, race, class, religion, looks, ability, language, citizenship, family, and reproductive status and sexuality,’ Bornstein said in a 2011 interview with the magazine Herizons.

A feminism based on the Liberation Ethic would question the very foundations of our work and family lives. It would attack the ‘masculine’ obsession with narrowly defined profit and productivity. It would demand generous social welfare programmes and part-time jobs with good pay, interesting work, and room for advancement. It would help people transform marriage to work for them – or create different kinds of relationships that suit them better. It would ditch the false dichotomy of dependence and independence and acknowledge that, in a complex human society, we are all necessarily interdependent. Above all, it would argue not that women should live more like men, but that everyone, regardless of gender, should live more like they want to.

What is more harmful — and pervasive in these disillusioned last days of the first black presidency — are the ways in which left-leaning discussions now share assumptions with the worst conservative and even white supremacist ideology. Whether put forth by racists or anti-racists, the insistence that, as James Baldwin noted, it is a person’s “categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended,” is oppressive. When genuinely anti-racist views lead us to the same practical conclusions an open bigot would embrace — that black life is miserable compared with white life — we give white people too much credit and strengthen the status quo.

The false choice between acknowledging the repugnant history of racism that informs the present, and the wish to accept the reality that a growing number of black people may nonetheless experience the freedom to define ourselves, is infantilizing. What this current moment of protest and awakening must lead us to, if it is to lead us anywhere, is a dignified means of fully inhabiting our ever more complicated identities.

It’s a strange and ironic double diminishment: first to feel oneself aggrieved, and then to conclude that the best response is to bask in fragility and retreat into an artificially indulgent social context. There is something utterly dehumanizing about being fit to a demographic profile, reduced to the sex or color of a body. While I may not be able to control how I look or how others perceive me, I control absolutely the ways I perceive myself. The idea that minorities need bubbles betrays an internalized sense of inferiority. When we concede public space as inherently hostile instead of deliberately claiming it as our own — as Martin Luther King Jr. and so many others did in the Sixties, as the gay-rights movement did more recently — we perpetuate and reinforce some of the very biases we seek to counteract.

Just as troubling, the growing power and influence of the appeal to vulnerability transforms it from a strictly defensive (if ineffective) tool into an increasingly potent method of intimidation that can silence even meaningful disagreement.

For the therapeutic society, such a goal continually recedes beyond the horizon. These therapies share many of the new assumptions about race: racism continues unabated; all slights are equal; anyone who endures racial slights of any kind or degree is a victim or a survivor who needs help; racism is an illness shared by all oppressors, who also need therapy; and small-group interactions and emotional catharsis are the primary ways in which the racial problems of the country should be faced. That there is never an end in sight — racism remains completely unchanged — handily gives the new therapies the rationale not just for persevering but for proselytizing through pamphlets, books, journals, classes, workshops and retreats.

…The therapeutic movement, with this ethos of empowerment, has trumped the civil rights movement, with its vision of the just society and the good life. The culture of therapy’s view that the problem for everyone — bigots, oppressors and leaders alike — is a lack of nurture, validation and support has inspired numerous best-selling books and talk shows. The spirit of the movement is that we are all owed unconditional acceptance at all times, and that any weaknesses we have are not our own responsibility.

…The notion of incorrect attitudes — stereotypes — both expands and diminishes the extent of the problem. No one is truly guilty here — no one is actually at fault — because it is society that breeds the wrong attitudes. Yet everyone must be subjected to self-examination, because everyone harbors these attitudes. Thus any distinction between a racially motivated act — like refusing to hire or promote someone or chasing someone out of one’s neighborhood on account of race, or worse — and a passive misconception one might have about a group one has never known intimately gets lost. This focus on attitudes of nebulous origin, and the misleading assumption that they are universal and as lethal as racist acts, comes from a loss of judgment and proportion. This loss of proportion and inability to distinguish among wrong acts rests on the idea that stereotypes are responsible for racism, not individuals.

I became interested in reading this book after seeing an intriguing reference to it in a Spiked article a few months ago. Shortly afterward, I fortuitously came across a copy in a secondhand bookstore. Having now read it, I have to amend my thinking a bit. You’ve heard me say many times that the trendy emphasis on intersectional social justice is merely the millennial generation’s twist on the tired old fashion of left-wing identity politics. I still think this is true, but slightly incomplete. Lasch-Quinn’s book does a very good job of illustrating the overlooked fact that both the vocabulary and the rhetorical framework favored by social justice warriors owe as much to the maudlin, emotionally-incontinent therapeutic culture as to the New Left. Truly, a grim example of the worst of both worlds combining as one.

His throat cleared as he got to the meat of his complaint. Left-wingers, who criticise other left-wingers, must be closet conservatives. The Eustonites were like the early American neoconservatives who condemned the stance of others on the left, he said. They went on ‘a journey that led most of us eventually to abandon the left for good’.

I had Labour MPs and intellectuals deliver the same lecture. Stick to your own tribe, they said. Don’t wash dirty linen in public. Pretend that the left did not contain moral and intellectual gulfs that could not be crossed, and more to the point should not be crossed.

Like Jonathan Haidt, Cohen will learn, if he hasn’t already, that there comes a point for gadflies when your right of self-definition is rescinded by the community. You are what a larger number of people say you are. The more you point at the scandalous behavior of your ostensible allies, the more their apologists will point threateningly at you. There’s no exit from the maze of question-begging and circular reasoning among those committed to defending the indefensible. Thomas Sowell once noted that “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.” It’s a paradox of political physics — to traverse the political spectrum, you only need to stand firm on some principle. You’ll travel from left to right without taking a single step.

I began to increasingly focus on criticizing the intersectional, social justice left a few years ago, and met with a fair amount of resistance from readers. Yet my criticisms themselves weren’t disputed — they were just “contextualized” into irrelevance. Well, that may be true, but in the aggregate, the other side is worse, so… Still, I insisted, the soil of left-wing thought has been contaminated for decades and shows no signs of improving. Nothing worth keeping is ever going to grow from it. The rest is useless hand-waving and special pleading.

When faced with such a bleak, overwhelming problem, it’s always tempting to look for another distraction, to personalize the impersonal. Comments here accordingly began to focus less on what I was seeing in order to fixate on what seeing it supposedly said about me. Straightforward observations made in a normal speaking voice were suddenly being tuned out and received on the ultrasonic level of signaling or the infrasonic level of personal subtext.

There are few things more insulting to a person’s dignity than to be treated as a victim of false consciousness. If you criticize your peers for a betrayal of principles, people who haven’t made a fraction of the effort you have to see and think clearly will appoint themselves your shepherd to make sure you don’t wander too far out of the progressive pasture. They will hover over your shoulder like a modern-day version of the Roman public slave, whispering “Remember, thou art liberal!” They will fuss and fret over your words like a hypochondriac and keep trying to stick a political thermometer under your tongue to check for signs of a conservative fever. Whatever it takes to keep the mirror focused on you and thus avoid any uncomfortable reflection.

Most people naturally react to tribal accusations of treachery by attempting to soften their pointed criticism, to justify themselves. But like a Chinese finger trap, this only keeps them held fast in a rhetorical snare. It’s futile to attempt to force your way free from the constrictions being imposed on you, which only plays into the logic of the trap. If you accept a need to justify your criticism, you play into the hands of those who will keep you permanently on the defensive by questioning your motivations. The only way you’ll convince them that you’re not criticizing your own side for ulterior motives is to stop criticizing. The trick, then, as with the finger trap, is to relax under the pressure rather than fight it. Speak the truth as you see it and associate with others who do the same. Ignore those who are more concerned with keeping up tribal appearances. Their respect isn’t worth what it takes to obtain it.

The kind of society where trust is widespread is likely to be fairly compact and quite homogenous. The most developed and successful welfare states of Europe are Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria with Germany as an interesting outlier. Most of these countries have very small populations: of the Scandinavian lands only Sweden tops 6 million inhabitants and between them all they comprise less people than Tokyo.

…But it is not just a question of size. Like New Zealand, another small country (pop. 4.2. million, even smaller than Norway) that has succeeded in maintaining a high level of civic trust, the successful welfare states of northern Europe were remarkably homogenous.

…Size and homogeneity are of course not transferable. There is no way for India or the USA to become Austria or Norway, and in their purest form the social democratic welfare states of Europe are simply non-exportable.

It was strange, I thought, that Judt brought this up in the middle of his book and then just…went back to nostalgically lamenting the loss of mid-twentieth-century American civic spirit without attempting to suggest how, indeed, a renewed vision for social democracy might surmount this formidable obstacle. I don’t mean to imply a necessity for the sort of cheap “call to action” that books like this typically end with, of course. American society will continue to evolve and redefine itself while paying no heed to the manifestos, blueprints or theories of intellectuals, which exist primarily to give other intellectuals something to chatter about. But assuming that most readers are coming to this book already sympathetic to Judt’s perspective, perhaps it would have been more useful for them to be confronted with harder questions about their own complicity — for instance, what does it say that those on the left who would love to see the United States transform into a social democracy are the same people who, through their dogmatic adherence to multiculturalism and the ethnic balkanization of identity politics, have done the most to undermine the possibility of a civic ethos capable of transcending the heterogeneity of over three hundred million people? If religion is a superstitious relic of a benighted age, and earnest talk about the civic creed of the American Dream only brings a cynical sneer in return, where are we to find the resources to develop the sort of cosmopolitan neighbor-love that Judt pined for? The question is never raised in these pages, and so we can only continue to wonder.

There’s something endlessly fascinating about the left’s insistence that Clarence Thomas is not “authentically” black—that this descendant of slaves, this grandson of sharecroppers, this hardworking man who rose to the grandest heights of the legal profession, is a traitor to his race and his class. I don’t know what it is about Thomas that drives the left so nuts, but it’s there, and it’s very real. Could you imagine what would happen if someone on the right described a brilliant liberal African-American of being no more than a slave controlled by white devils?

I hate to say this—the charge is offered all too often with far little in the way of support—but that shit is racist as hell.

Leave aside the “More like Uncle Clarence Thomas, amirite?” sniggering. The suggestion that Clarence Thomas is just a mindless puppet whose strings were pulled by Antonin Scalia is racist and ignorant and wholly unsupported by anything resembling the facts. Jeffrey Toobin—no fan of Thomas, he!—has said as much in the storied pages of the New Yorker.

I’m sure Bunch’s befuddlement is just rhetorical; he knows full well that Thomas is guilty of giving the lie to progressive homilies about race. “Authentic” blacks just coincidentally happen to be the ones who choose the same political positions as the white progressives who want to be credited for making a big display of standing aside and relinquishing their grip on power. “Now, Clarence, where on Earth did you get your head filled with all these crazy conservative ideas? Have you been hanging around with that Scalia boy again? I’ve told you he’s bad news, haven’t I? Look, we only want you to be happy and successful, but that means you have to listen to us when we give you advice. We know best, after all.” Actually, come to think of it, I’d love to see the Venn diagram of patronizing progressive racists and helicopter parents.

The principal achievement of the crusade against cultural appropriation is to turn every form of cultural interaction into a site for conflict. This idea of appropriation has as its foundation the conviction that culture is the sacred property of its moral guardians. It is based on the premise that unless cultural artefacts, practices, rituals and even food are used in a reverent and respectful manner, then something akin to religious sacrilege has been committed. Such a pious attitude towards culture does not merely apply to religious rituals and symbols; it also applies to the most banal features of everyday existence, such as the label on your shirt or the snack you are eating.

The constant demand for respect and culturally correct behaviour actually serves to desensitise people to the distinction between rituals and practices that are genuinely worthy of respect and those that can be taken in one’s stride. If the demand for respect for everything becomes automatic, then making distinctions between truly important practices, such as a religious ritual, and trivial ones, such as eating a curry, becomes complicated and even meaningless.

Two things especially amuse me here. One, how innocent I was six years ago, as I considered Aseem Shukla some sort of weird outlier, little suspecting what a harbinger of madness he was! Two, the thought of an old-school white separatist — as opposed to the new progressive variety — watching all this unfold. Is he amused or bemused at the thought that the sons and daughters of the liberals he hated are doing his work for him? Or perhaps he’s muttering softly to himself, “Branding. It’s all about branding.“

Well, there’s a name I hadn’t heard or thought about in a good while — it seems Peezus Myers recently got caught piling one lie upon another before responding with his usual bluster to being called on it. How do I feel about this? Grateful, I have to say.

No, I’m not being facetious. In truth, I stopped reading the godless blogosphere a year ago, and during my hiatus, when I was only online for brief periods, I never saw any mention of him or his clownish comrades to keep my scorn levels elevated. Now, with the perspective gained through the passing of time, I realize that I owe the man some genuine gratitude. I can’t deny that because of him, in a very direct way, my life has changed for the better.

Peezus was the inspiration for my own Cartesian reckoning, as I like to call it. I don’t mean that I sat down like Descartes and doubted my own existence and sanity — I just mean that, thanks to his example, I was forced into doing some serious conceptual renovating from the ground up. I used to read Pharyngula every day, so from the start, I watched him develop his futile project to fuse New Atheism with New Left identity politics and pseudo-radicalism. As he began to increasingly venture outside of his comfort zone of biology or atheist pedantry, I would start to notice how shallow and uninformed his “arguments” were. What he lacked in knowledge or curiosity, he made up for with bombast and sneering contempt. He was bolstered in this by the symbiotic relationship he developed with his commentariat, both sides becoming worse than they could have ever managed on their own. It was like being given a free online course to study cognitive biases, virtue signaling, in-group vs. out-group dynamics, the attraction and perils of groupthink, and the ultra-conformist tendencies built into the structure of social media. I gazed into the Nietzschean abyss, but thankfully, the abyss was too dysfunctional and narcissistic to gaze back into me.

Faced with what seemed to be a bewildering transformation among people I thought I understood, I threw myself into learning as much as I could to place it all in context. That meant having the humility to declare a near-complete agnosticism about sociopolitical issues while I took the time to ask questions I should have asked long before. Slowly, over the next few years, I began to rebuild the foundations of a coherent perspective, one piece of insight at a time, jettisoning all the broken pieces that no longer fit. It seemed daunting at first, but it has become increasingly joyful. So much wisdom to be found in places I was scared to look before!

It’s true that the more you learn, the more you become aware of how little you actually know. But I’ve come far enough to be able to look back in appreciation at the irony of how this pathetic, rage-filled man who wanted to help lead an atheist revolution to change the world, through his ignominious failure, unwittingly became the Archimedean lever that moved my worldview.

But, we thought, the most important challenge blogging posed was to the idea of the self in self-expression. Blogging was more about connecting with others than about expressing ourselves. Truth, we thought, was more likely to live in webs of ideas and responses than in the mouth of any one individual braying from soapbox, whether that soapbox was The New York Times or a blogger read by five people. By linking and commenting, we were consciously building a social space for voices in conversation.

…So what happened?

Mainly, Facebook happened. Constructing social networks by blogging takes work. You have to read, respond, post. You have to stay on top of the topics sweeping through what used to be called the “blogosphere.” Facebook is much better at building social networks for people. And you don’t have to spend serious time writing essays. Twitter lowered the character count further.

Blogging still lives, Weinberger triumphantly concludes, which will only be surprising to those who have repeatedly pronounced it dead, in which “dead” is understood to mean “less novel and popular than it was ten years ago”, which is only “death” if you conceive of social media as the world’s longest fashion catwalk where “uncool” is the undiscovered country, from which no tech-savvy hipster has ever returned, awaiting at the edge, and if you’re that shallow and flighty, you probably prefer gifs and emoticons to words and sentences anyway. All of which is to say, personal essays have been around ever since Montaigne scratched his bald head and pondered “What the hell do I know anyway?” before picking up his quill. They’ll still be around after different technological platforms come and go.

Given how many other blogs I have seen turning off comments, though, I think that whole “connecting with others” idea has long since lost its sparkle. Facebook can have it. Leave this space to those of us who have always known that the best thinking and writing blooms during solitary reflection.

Though there are individual exceptions, the absence of Beard is usually a sign of physical and moral weakness; and in degenerate tribes wholly without, or very deficient, there is a conscious want of manly dignity, and contentedness with a low physical, moral, and intellectual condition. Such tribes have to be sought for by the physiologist and ethnologist; the historian is never called upon to do honor to their deeds.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.